


One last letter

by thepurplewombat



Series: Homecoming [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, I really am, I woke up this morning and this was in my head, I'm Sorry, Post-Reichenbach, Reichenbach Angst, Reichenbach Feels, Reichenfeels, Suicide Notes, implied major character death, implied suicide, johnlock if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-16
Updated: 2013-10-16
Packaged: 2017-12-29 13:59:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1006267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepurplewombat/pseuds/thepurplewombat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm tired of pretending I don't see your eyes every time I close mine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One last letter

I think it’s time I stopped pretending.

Stopped pretending that I’m okay, that I can do this, that I can be strong.

It’s time I stopped pretending that I don’t see your eyes every time I close mine.

Do you know that every time I see a murder on the telly I turn to the couch where I never sit as though to ask ‘well, what do you think?’ That every time I watch a Bond film I wait for you to start shouting at the screen?

Do you know that I still eat at Angelo’s and he still brings a candle every time and never lets me pay, but he never mentions your name. And I’m grateful for that, grateful for the way nobody talks about you because if they did I might start crying, and if I start crying I might never stop.

I don’t speak to Lestrade or Molly or anyone from that time anymore, Mrs Hudson and Angelo excepted. They might mention your name.

Mycroft is safe, though. Mycroft comes once a week like clockwork, lets me make him tea and doesn’t say a word until he leaves. The first time he showed up at my door I nearly shot him, and he just…he just looked at me with this expression on his face. If I hadn’t known better, if I hadn’t known Mycroft, I would have said it was hopeful. I don’t know why I let him in, or why he comes. I suppose it may be comforting to think that there’s someone else in the world who understands what we’ve lost. So every Friday for an hour, Mycroft comes to me, and I make him tea, and we sit in silence and don’t look at each other. If he cries, I’ve never seen it. If I cried, he had the decency to pretend he didn’t.

I’ve started noticing the things you would have noticed about people, and every time I make a deduction in my head I turn to my left and wait for you to tell me that I’ve missed everything of importance. It hurts every time, and it never gets better.

It hurts every time I open the door and you’re not there, talking to me as though I’d never left, as though you couldn’t fathom me being anywhere but at your side, in your flat, in your home. To be honest, I can’t fathom being anywhere else either. It’s why I’m still here, with Mrs Hudson downstairs - she brings me breakfast, and lunch, and dinner, and tea in between, and does all the dusting and hoovering and never says she’s not my housekeeper anymore - and the skull on the mantlepiece. I could have moved out, but the panic at the very idea of leaving this place for good, this place with you written all over it was worse than anything I could have imagined.

So I stay in the place where we lived together, and I sit in my chair and never touch your things, and sometimes when it’s dark and I can’t sleep and the moon falls just so in the living room I can imagine that you’re there, passed out on the couch the way you would sometimes, or in a sulk, or ‘thinking’ (which I always suspected was just an excuse for you being a lazy git who couldn’t be bothered fetching his own tea). I can go into your room and mess up your sock index and imagine the screaming tantrum you would have had, and then I can go back and sort them all again, just the way you would have - I do understand your sock index, you know, I just always liked to pretend I didn’t.

I catch myself making two cups of tea in the mornings sometimes, and then I have to go for a walk before I can come back and pour the extra cup - with too much milk and too much sugar - down the drain. Sometimes, for no reason I can think of except that for a moment I’ve forgotten that you’re not here, I make a cup of coffee - black, with two sugars - and stare at it blankly for a while before pouring that down the drain too.

It’s been two years. Two years, eleven months and fifteen days, and I’m tired. Tired of being alone, tired of trying, tired of extra cups of tea and coffee I’ll never drink.

I guess that one last miracle was too much to ask.

I hope you’re waiting for me, Sherlock. You’d be lost without your blogger. And I was lost without you.


End file.
